Building new things has led
to some of humanity's biggest leaps forward.
We made tools, forged new materials,
and learned to produce them for millions.
And then billions.
With every new innovation comes news industries,
new economies, new challenges.
And we're always looking for what comes next.
Three,
two, one.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy, go for launch.
The industrialization of space, I think,
will be one of the great economic booms of this century.
Space offers a whole new environment
to create things; things we can't make on Earth.
Gravity in general is something
that we all just take for granted,
because it's just always here; it affects everything.
What becomes interesting is,
what happens when you take that away?
Private companies are creating new materials,
3D printing tools, even living tissue.
And developing the technology
to build entire factories in space.
If successful, for-profit manufacturing
could lead to a new gold rush,
launching the business of space to its next Giant Leap.
Elon Musk and Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos,
and many other industrialists, they're making big
investments to go up there, but there has to be a why.
There has to be a reason to go to space.
We wanna see a very robust commercial marketplace in space
but the other thing that we have to do
is we have to prove, we have to prove the industries
that ultimately are gonna be able to take advantage
of the micro-gravity environment of space.
In space we're opening the way to private enterprise.
Since the 1980s, companies have been
investigating the unique properties of micro-gravity,
yielding major breakthroughs in the areas
of biomedicine and advanced materials research.
And now some are looking to start production.
Manufacturing in space has at its core the following idea:
This extraordinary environment, with a completely different
set of environmental factors than the Earth,
can enable you to manufacture things
that you couldn't manufacture on Earth, that have value.
Our economy has historically been a value-added economy.
We take raw material and we turn it into steel.
And we sell that steel for profit.
Finding new ways of making things is historically
the makings of economic boom.
Three, two, one,
zero, ignition; liftoff.
In July of 2019, SpaceX's CRS-18
launched with over a dozen new research projects,
including investigations being conducted
by Goodyear and Adidas.
Both companies hope that studying their products
in micro-gravity, could unlock new opportunities.
Also aboard the mission is a biomaterial 3D printer.
And with it, the chance to print whole human organs.
Spock, B.F.F. on side four.
Go ahead.
So, you were working with DMT
to go ahead and get our command window up
a little early, correct?
Yes, bandwidth is available.
Okay, so I'm just pressing
where the numbers are and,
making sure they're turned on in sets.
Christina, we should be good to go hands-free now.
Copy with a thumbs up.
We do wanna start by opening up the cassette kit.
It's just past three a.m.,
and the team at Techshot is prepping
their initial printing run for the newly arrived
bio-fabrication facility, or B.F.F..
Fueled by coffee and the type of food
you might expect to find at three a.m.,
the team is working directly with astronauts
aboard the I.S.S., all from the comfort
of Techshot headquarters,
located just outside Louisville, Kentucky.
Now we want to double check that the smart pumps
are in the up position.
We're gonna be sliding the cassette in,
and we just don't wanna bump 'em with the cassette.
I see.
That looks great.
We are good to go ahead and put the door back on.
Okay, copy that.
We'll be able to do some printing.
Definitely.
From the outside, the B.F.F.
doesn't look that much different
to traditional 3D printers, but inside,
these smart pumps are being loaded with living cells.
And for the company, all eyes are focused
on the inaugural drop, paving the first biological brick
on the long road to printing human organs.
Currently there's over 113,000 people
on the organ donation list, and 22 people are dying
every day because there's not an organ available.
B.F.F. has that long-term potential
to someday maybe be able to provide some hope
and a cure for some of those people.
This is John Vellinger,
the CEO of Techshot, a company he co-founded
over 30 years ago.
While his latest project just succeeded
in its initial test prints, the B.F.F. has a long way to go
before it's printing anything as complex
as a human liver or heart.
Techshot is demonstrating the B.F.F. technology
with this current flight, and we anticipate
being able to print; organs and structures might be
five to 10 years out.
Bio-printers have been on Earth
for over a decade and can print things like ear
and nose cartilage that are living tissue.
But for complex systems like organs,
the difficulty has been printing the vascular networks
within the tissue itself.
Without vascular tissue to distribute the needed nutrients,
any printed cells would die off,
well before they could be used.
And Techshot believes that gravity
is a big part of the challenge.
So, let's just say that you want to create something
that has one layer of cells.
So then on top of that, a different layer of cells,
and on top of that a third layer of cells.
So, one way that you could do that
would be to just print one cell in the layer,
and then your second layer with another type of cell,
and then your third layer with another type of cell.
But depending on those materials,
over a short period time those cells may not stay
in those layers; they may settle out
and then end up combining.
You think of printing, if you tried to print with water,
here on Earth, you know what would happen.
It would just squirt out like out of a water gun.
And that is because in a gravity environment,
everything wants to just squirt out and wet out
and spread out; but in a micro-gravity environment,
you don't have to worry about any of that.
So you have a much wider range of materials
that you can print with.
To combat the effects of gravity on Earth,
researchers have used scaffolded structures
in order to support the growing cells.
The problem is, a lot of ways that that is accomplished
isn't necessarily the best for biology.
It can limit the types of materials that you can use,
and it can also limit the types of cells
that can really thrive in that environment.
In micro-gravity, you wouldn't necessarily
have to do that; you could have your different layers
or areas or sections of different types of cells
and put them next to each other.
And there are no other forces
that are gonna cause them to mix.
So you have this opportunity to be able to make
these small regions in three dimensions,
in a different type of way, and different type
of structure that would be very difficult
to do on the ground.
Micro-gravity-enabled bio-printing
still has numerous hurdles to cross
before it can produce a product for sale.
Only now that the printer is operating aboard the I.S.S.
can researchers begin to understand the correct materials
and process necessary, not only to print organs,
but to culture and preserve them long enough
to return back to Earth.
But all that time and research is part of Techshot's plan.
Techshot's business model is to be a tech engine.
We're generating new technologies.
Then if we feel like that technology has a potential,
commercial potential, we spin that off
into a different company or to a different group.
They liken their business
to Levi Strauss in the 1800s.
During the Gold Rush, Levi Strauss started out
by providing canvas material for tents and wagons.
And when those miners needed a more durable fabric,
the now iconic blue jeans were born.
The business model of selling pick axes
as opposed to going out and panning for gold,
really certainly applies to space.
And there are many companies at the component level
that are providing products and services
to launch companies, to satellite operators, to NASA.
One of the challenges in that business model
is you need a gold rush.
It's not clear that 3D-printed organs
could set off any kind of a gold rush to space.
So in order to stay in business,
Techshot needs to have other projects,
making sure it doesn't keep all of its eggs
in one satellite.
This is my science fair project
that I started in eighth grade.
The whole experiment was to see how the chicken embryo
develop in space without the presence of gravity.
This science project evolved
into the Space Shuttle project.
Imagine this chicken egg
in the back of the back of the barnyard.
Gravity is causing the yolk to fall
to the bottom of the egg.
Now, the hen has a natural instinct
of turning that egg around.
So therefore, the yolk will fall, go back up to the top,
and gravity pulls it back down to the bottom again.
Now, what would happen to that egg up in space?
The project was sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken.
In which their worldwide headquarters
is located in Louisville.
And so the engineer that I worked with, Mark Deuser,
he and I are the ones that decided to start Techshot,
and start it right here in Louisville, Kentucky.
We started in a motel.
It was just two rooms, and eventually we went
into four rooms of the motel.
And then as Techshot matured and developed,
and gained more projects and more opportunities,
then we decided, you know, we're in this for the long haul.
And so we built a world-class research facility here
that we're sitting in today.
And here, just across the street
from that first motel room, Techshot is currently working
on 15 active projects,
creating technology for NASA, the military,
and major pharmaceutical companies.
All with the goal to support researchers in micro-gravity.
Last year was Techshot's best year in its history.
I think that's reflective of the excitement
of the new opportunities that are out there for space.
And if they're lucky, one of these projects
could yield that catalyst of a space gold rush.
But they aren't alone in this race.
Another company, located in Silicon Valley,
views making things as space as core to their mission,
even down to their name.
This is fiber-optic cable.
It works because the fiber reflects light
over and over inside the structure.
And even if you bend it,
the light still comes through the other end.
But in this application, it's nothing more
than a modern-looking lava lamp.
The best fiber-optic cable is being used
to transmit data all over the world.
In fact, undersea cables carry 99%
of all the data that crosses oceans.
Optical fiber, usually made from silica,
is important because it can transmit data
incredibly quickly over a long distance,
before needing to have its signal amplified.
But research done by the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s
proved that it would be possible to produce a fiber
known as ZBLAN, that could far exceed
traditional silica fiber.
The only catch: It needs to be made in micro-gravity.
ZBLAN is an optical glass that has a transmission window
that's about five times wider than traditional silica glass.
And it has a signal loss that's 10-100 times better
than traditional silica glass.
This is Andrew Rush,
the CEO of Made In Space, a company with a mission
to create a new industrial foothold in space.
And it sees ZBLAN as potentially the first material
that can be made in space and sold on Earth.
So, this is a preform of ZBLAN.
It extracts out as this nice dog-bone cylinder.
And then it gets inserted into a furnace.
This gets thinner and thinner; thinner than the width
of your own hair, and then you start pulling that.
So if everything works out, you get a spool like this,
from our earlier test runs.
Basically looks like fishing line.
While it is possible to produce ZBLAN on Earth,
it's nowhere near the potential
of what you can produce in micro-gravity.
Earth-manufactured ZBLAN suffers from too many crystals
in the material, and basically what happens is when light
or power goes through these crystal domains,
they reduce each time, creating a power loss
throughout the length of fiber you're going through.
Micro-gravity suppresses these formations.
And doing so creates more of a mono-crystalline structure,
so you don't have all these domain drops.
And you have less of a power drop over that length of fiber.
You know, you can go trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific
without having repeaters in the lines,
like traditional fiber lines do today.
If you can imagine providing five,
10, 15 times more bandwidth down the same line of fiber
by using ZBLAN instead of silica,
you begin to scratch the surface
of the economic potential of ZBLAN.
They estimate that a kilogram of ZBLAN
could sell for 10s, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars
and that high price per kilogram is important
when it comes to space manufacturing.
Historically a barrier to doing a lot
of commercial activity in space has been
that it costs so much money to get to space,
do things, and then come back.
It can literally cost 10s of thousands of dollars
a kilogram to launch, operate, and return.
And that's why things like ZBLAN are so attractive,
because we can sustainably sell them
for 10s of thousands of dollars a kilogram.
Meaning at some point,
whole factories could be created in space.
Receiving raw material from the ground
and shipping micro-gravity-enabled ZBLAN back to Earth.
But the problem is, it's all still theoretical.
Made In Space has been working on ZBLAN for over four years
and has flown four missions
to test their manufacturing techniques,
with more planned in the future.
But they still expect to be a few years away
from producing a product that could be sold on Earth,
let alone scaling that to larger industries.
It's very interesting and a little counter-intuitive.
The most successful companies in space
are the companies that consistently say,
"How can I do this on Earth?"
There have been many products that started
with the vision of actually manufacturing in space,
and ended up with a discovery phase in space
and manufacturing on Earth.
And that's good news for consumers,
that's good news for the end users of those products,
because that reduces cost.
You don't build your manufacturing plant
on the most expensive real estate
you can possibly get ahold of.
You build your manufacturing plant
where you can manufacture economically.
For Made In Space, though,
discovering the first product
that can truly be made in space,
is more than just profit and loss.
The establishment of space-manufactured ZBLAN
as a product line,
is core to our vision.
That's the industrialization of space right there.
That's the Netscape moment
of low-earth-orbit commercialization.
If in our research and development for ZBLAN,
say we found ways of improving ZBLAN
that we could actually apply terrestrially,
like apply in a gravity field,
we would be excited about that.
For us, we'd take the profits from that,
and pile that back in, and do more cool space stuff.
And while the company is also investigating
other materials like ZBLAN that can be produced in space,
they've already laid the groundwork for a whole new way
of thinking about in-space manufacturing.
And they call it Archinaut.
Archinaut is one of many steps
toward those broader visions.
Archinaut is more of a capability than a thing.
The capability can enable virtually
anything you can think of in terms of structures in space.
You can build large things, small things that are optimized,
it doesn't really matter.
Archinaut blends robotic manufacturing
with 3D printing, allowing it to create
and assemble products in space.
Meaning, instead of flying something like,
say a satellite to space, you could create them there.
But before Made In Space can use Archinaut
as an in-space factory, it needs to turn
its vision into a sustainable business.
There is no shortage in space
of visionaries. What I really wanna
try to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible.
The visionaries that we are seeing succeed,
are the visionaries that attach their vision
to an incremental pathway.
We've been very fortunate to work closely with NASA
for a number of years in developing
gravity-independent manufacturing technologies.
And the first one of those technologies
that we really tackled was 3D printing.
International Space Station
has its own 3D printer, and look at this,
astronauts created the first object to be made with it.
It's a white printer part.
The first print that we did
was a plate for the printer.
It said NASA and it said Made In Space on it.
Is it fair to say the first thing
you made in space was marketing material?
I mean,
we actually kinda joked that the first thing we did
was demonstrate that you could make
self-repairing robots in space.
To date, Made In Space has created
over 200 objects aboard the I.S.S..
And with its second printer,
named the Additive Manufacturing Facility,
they were able to not only prove their technology,
but turn it into a business.
We've struck kind of an interesting deal with them,
where we actually retained ownership of the device,
and actually operated it as a service.
And printed parts for NASA, for other individuals,
for companies, for schools.
So, really starting to build on it's this machine shop
in space kind of business model.
The approach that we've taken at Made In Space
has been to have these really great, this really inspiring,
bit vision, but we take that big vision
and we decompose that into digestible chunks.
Like, steps along that path toward these fantastic futures.
And that first incremental step
for Archinaut is to change how we think
about manufacturing satellites.
Archinaut One project is a free-flying satellite,
which will manufacture 10-meter booms.
And those 10-meter booms will have solar arrays
on them which allow a small sat to manufacture
on the order of about a kilowatt of power.
The Archinaut One mission will launch in 2022.
It's part of a public/private partnership with NASA.
And the project aims to reduce the cost
of putting satellites into orbit.
While satellites have been getting smaller,
if you need a satellite that'll require lots of power,
you'll most likely need a massive solar array.
But large arrays are difficult to fit into rocket payloads,
the so-called tyranny of the fairing.
And it gets expensive.
One way around this problem was to spend heavily
on engineers to devise solutions
for folding arrays into compact configurations.
Then, deploy at their full size once in space.
But all that work and extra weight on a rocket
can add tens if not hundreds of millions
of dollars to a launch cost.
Archinaut gives satellite-makers a new option:
Include a 3D printer and robotic arm
onto their existing satellites, and let Archinaut
build their very large solar arrays in space.
This could reduce the costs of getting power-hungry
satellites into orbit, and potentially open up
whole new industries to space.
Probably the most significant factor
for the financial success of a space-based
or space-related business, is economies of scale.
The more activity there is, the more feasible it is.
Both Made In Space and NASA
hopes that Archinaut will help reduce the cost
of doing business in space.
But it's still unclear whether larger
and cheaper solar arrays is the answer
to finding scale in production.
A successful strategy for manufacturing in space
is to demonstrate capabilities,
and to have adaptable capabilities
that can serve different customers.
When you combine that robotic assembly
and additive manufacturing, it really opens the door
for customization for clients.
Folks may say, hey, I actually don't need that much power
because of my mission, but I need a big antennae.
Or, I need a large radiator.
Archinaut, because it's general,
means that I can provide those services
quickly, and at low cost.
We hope that folks see what we're doing
and are inspired by it, and say,
hey, this is what I need.
So yeah, it'd be great if somebody came to us
and said, "This is the thing that we wanna make."
And we're like, oh my gosh,
that's the killer app.
The hope for Archinaut,
just like with ZBLAN and organ printing,
is that one of these businesses can be that spark
for space industrialization.
I think, once people see the potential of micro-gravity,
I think a lot more people, a lot more commercial entities
will get involved in space research.
Because I think it is such a unique environment,
that that different way of thinking leads to innovation.
And so I think you see so much excitement
and so much interest because the potential
to come up with new products, new innovations, is real.
The ability to manufacture in space
means that we break the tyranny of the launch fairing.
And we can now make structures that are really enormous.
Make structures that are on the size and scale
of things that we're comfortable with
and we interact with on Earth on a consistent basis,
you know, larger buildings, multi-story buildings.
Nothing like that exists in space.
But we need to be able to make structures
and spacecraft and habitats that are that size,
if we are really to sustainably move into space,
move into low-Earth orbit and beyond.
And as industry enters low-Earth orbit,
we'll begin to explore the next financial future.
The Moon, Mars, even asteroids,
contain potentially invaluable resources.
On the next Giant Leap, we'll explore the private companies
developing the technology needed for off-world mining.
But in order for it to become a business,
it'll take another Giant Leap.